I had an application built on top of DNN. We created a few custom DNN modules for it. Now the functionality is required in another application that is not going to be built on DNN but on plain old ASP.NET. The question is that can the existing modules somehow be reused as is in other applications as plain UserControls somehow??
Well yes a no
If the logic and security of the module are not depedent on any of the dnn namespaces then its easy but if they are then you may have to rewrite and rethink - really though in my opnion once you have built a module its easy to rebuild it without dnn after all the real challenge is getting the logic to work that first time.
It depends.
If you have a deep level of integration with DNN (eg exceptions, user accounts ect) you will have to swap those pieces out for whatever you will be using on the vanilla ASP.NET WebForms site.
Basically, it "can" be done but with a bit of work.
Related
We have a series of ASP.Net applications that have been written over the course of 8 years. Mostly in the first 3-4 years. They have been running quite well with little maintenance, but new functionality is being requested and we are running into IDE and platform issues. The apps were written in .Net 1.x and 2.x and run in separate spaces but are presented as a single suite of applications which use a common navigation toolbar (implemented as a user control). Every time we want to add something to a menu in the nav we have to modify it in all the apps which is a pain. Also, the various versions of Crystal reports and that we used tables to organize the visual elements and we end up with a mess, especially with all the multi-platform .Net versions running. We need to streamline the suite of apps and make it easier to add on new apps without a hassle. We also need to bring all these apps under one .Net platform and IDE.
In addition, there is a WordPress blog styled to match the style of the application suite "integrated" into the UI and a link to a MediaWiki Wiki application as well.
My current thinking is to use an open source content management system (CMS) like Joomla (PHP based unfortunately, but it works well) as the user interface framework for style templating and menu management. Joomla's article management would allow us to migrate the Wiki content into articles which could be published without interfering with the .Net apps. Then essentially use an IFrame within an "article" to "host" the .Net application, then...
Upgrade the .Net apps to VS2010, strip out all the common header/footer controls and migrate the styles to use the style sheets used in the CMS.
As I write this, I certainly realize this is a lot of work and there are optimization issues which this may cause as well as using IFrames seems a bit like cheating and I've read about issues with IFrames.
I know that we could use .Net application styling, but it seems like a lot more work (not sure really). Also, the use of a CMS to handle the blog and wiki also seems appealing, unless there is a .Net CMS out there that can handle all of these requirements.
Given this information, I am looking to know if I am totally going in the wrong direction? We tried to use open source and integrate it over time, but not this has become hard to maintain. Am I not aware of some technology out there that will meet our requirements? Did we do this right and should we just focus on getting the .Net streamlined? I understand that no matter what we do, it's going to be a lot of work. The communities considerable experience would be helpful. Thanks!!
PS - A complete rewrite is not an option.
Hmm, we're in the midst of a project to do something that sounds familiar. We're using www.sitecore.net CMS but you could use the Open Source alternative Umbraco again both of these will have a learning curve, but they're .Net apps and aren't targetted specifically at blogs. SiteCore ultimately can use normal .Net user controls if you want, though it's slightly against their model, but it works.
One thing I'll warn you of is SiteCore Must be the root of your website, it has to control the root of the domain (it has a urlrewriting module that needs to be at the root) and you can tell it to exclude certain folders where your applications might live. You can obviously put your navigation in a folder under the root of the site. Also note SiteCore's a .Net 3.5 application running under the 2.0 runtime.
Are your sub-applications.. Actual seperate applications in virtual dirs or something I'm guessing?
Depending on the nature of the .Net apps, you may find DotNetNuke to be a useful choice.
It's a CMS where you write widgets ('modules') in .Net, then add them to the pages of the CMS. In your case, you'd wrap your existing functionality in such widgets. I've done exactly this several times, and now that I'm used to it it's no big deal.
The downside is you have to learn to swim in the DNN environment, which (like any CMS) has a bit of a learning curve.
I'd have to know a lot more about your existing apps to be sure this is a plausible option. If it looks appealing, you should probably contact someone who's dealt with a situation like yours (such as myself) and go into detail. It's very easy to find yourself in a dead end with these CMS frameworks.
Edit: Like a product mentioned in a different answer, DNN has to control the top level of its subdomain -- all requests begin by going through Default.aspx and are then dispatched in various ways.
A friend of mine really likes using Joomla as a base for his websites. He also likes the power that Asp.Net has and can code in VB.Net.
He wants to use Joomla as the "Master Page" and Asp.Net/VB.Net/SQL Server to handle the main business logic of the application. He is planning on using the Joomla Wrapper Module (an IFrame, joomla modules) to integrate the ASP.Net into the Joomla website.
Joomla will be able to handle the security (users,roles,registration), menu (based on roles), static content (e.g. About Us page) and it will pass an Encrypted Username & Password to the Asp.Net web page (example here).
The goal of the website is to allow users to register & subscribe to a (free or paid) service where they will be able to customize content and download it as a file.
What disadvantages are there when doing this? Are there work arounds?
Some issues that I can think of are:
Links clicked in an IFrame won't change the browser's url which means that you can't bookmark pages and they aren't in the browsers history.
If Asp.Net has to know the users/roles (which is very likely) then it would have to access the Joomla database or keep its own user table which will have to be in sync with Joomla's users.
EDIT:
I would never build a new website this way, but I was looking for concrete points to convince my friend that using Joomla and Asp.Net together isn't a good idea.
I believe your friend's idea is fine. Both platforms have strong points. Joomla is a mature open source CMS platform that has an enormous amount of community contributed components and it is easy to use which makes it appealing. But I can also see instances where you may want to include ASP.Net functionality in certain scenarios. I have had clients who use Joomla but wanted an app I have written in .Net and it did not make sense to spend the time or money to rewrite it in PHP and MySql. The two can be integrated securely. I wish your friend luck in his endeavors.
I don't see what advantage you get from using Joomla when the app is ASP.net (nor the advantage of coding an ASP.net app when the framework uses PHP/MySQL).
I'm not convinced the security is tight because you can open iframes and bypass the Joomla security. Then you talk about passing username/password to the iframe - but now you need to validate this again through the ASP.net app.
I once coded an app in raw PHP and included it in a Joomla site using iframes. I realized fairly quickly that there was basically no security because the raw PHP had no knowledge of Joomla (although the app was not visible to site visitors and only known about by admin). I quickly recoded it into a built-in component.
To me, this sounds like you're reinventing the wheel on both sides of the app. If you want to use Joomla, either learn how to make components (it's pretty simple) and do it in PHP, or hire someone to do it for you ;).
If PHP is not your strong point, then use a full ASP.net site, perhaps with a CMS as GmonC suggested. Even creating your own basic CMS with some pre-built components (e.g. Telerik) would probably be quicker than integrating PHP and ASP.
Seriously, IMHO, if you're not going to integrate some legacy system or isn't doing this kind of "integration" development as an "experiment" to learn something - in a summarized way, if you just want to have your work done, I think the description you provided inserts a lot of complexity and overhead that aren't needed in the first place.
This added complexity of two completely different ecosystems is a disadvantage to what should be just simpler. I really believe you should try to use Joomla or other CMS written in .net like dotnetnuke (or build your own) instead of this configuration.
If you add more information about what are the goals and objectives of this project, my opinion may change. Until them, I keep my opinion of simplicity.
The time and effort you are going to go through to use Joomla is going to far outweight what it would take to just get some other CMS that was designed for .NET.
Stop over-engineering yourself into a midlife crisis.
Also, Joomla? Seriously? Joomla?
me too don't get any advantages for joomla, it's big system and it just as good as wordpress for regular projects, just wordpress is much simplier. joomla has no good documentation to learn and hard to extend.
We are developing a CMS in ASP.NET. We love the idea of add-ons (like in Wordpress, where any developer can add a menu button or a widget) and would like to enable developers to do the same with our system.
However I think that the fact that C# is a compiled language is an obstacle in the way of add-ons.
Am I right? Or is there a way to create add-ons for a ASP.NET application?
The fact that C# is a compiled language isn't a problem at all. In fact the .NET framework should make it relatively easy to load other code (just as Java does, for the same reason). Look into the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is all about loading Add-Ons in managed code.
It's not an obstacle at all. MEF has already been mentioned, you could also use:
System.Addin
Mono.Addins
I'm not sure for ASP.NET specifically, but in the only compiled programming language I know (Objective-C/Cocoa), there's the concept of Bundles that can be loaded dynamically. I'm not sure how that works on the backend, but I'd guess that there is some similar system for C#/ASP.NET.
I don't know how it's done in Wordpress, but there should be many ways. You can allow developers to upload their assemblies with compiled code or you can allow them to upload code in C# or IronPython or anything that supported and compile it dynamically. Maybe you can use WebParts for your task.
Microsoft has created the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), specifically for this problem: providing .NET plugins for .NET applications. It is the framework that (future versions of) Visual Studio use for writing managed plugins.
However, please consider using a dynamic scripting language for this! Problems like this are exactly what they are specifically designed for. If you host the Dynamic Language Runtime in your application, it not only means that your users can extend the application in a scripting language, but even in any dynamic language (scripting or otherwise) for which a DLR implementation exists: Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, Scheme, JavaScript, PHP, you name it. Biggest disadvantage: the DLR hasn't been released yet.
In C#, you can create any assemblies, link them as DLL files and then do whatever you want.
The usual case would be to define some kind of Plugin Interface which must be implemented by all the plugins.
Then you can load all plugins from the filesystem (by iterating over the plugin DLLs), find the class inside which implements the interface, instantiate it and work with it.
If you want to provide plugins with unloadability and security, you could create an application domain and load the plugins to that, increasing complexity, but also increasing stability (a bad plugin won't crash your app).
Please ask more specifically if you want a specific answer :-)
It's not too difficult to put hooks in place. You have to define in advance where the add-on features will appear. For example: when drawing a menu you can use reflection to search other dlls (with specific names and locations) for a "BuildMenu" function. You'll be defining the API for this function signature. It may have to return a list of items to be added to the base menu items collection.
I currently develop with Django, but want to be ready when a future client inevitably requests a site done in ASP.NET MVC. While most of the structure and flow of ASP.NET MVC is more or less identical to Django and RoR, the one part I'm not sure about is the Apps methodology Django employs to make code reuse easier.
Is there an equivalent to Django apps in ASP.NET MVC? That is, can I create a feature, like tagging, comments, calendar of events, simple blog, etc. and bundle it up, making it portable to other projects with a minimum of glue code required to integrate it? Perhaps some kind of plugin or module system?
Django doesn't follow the traditional MVC pattern, since they advocate that in the Web world, their MTV is more suitable. In the overall, I prefer Django over Rails because of the django apps. You can do almost the same in RoR with the Rails vendor plugins, but it's not the same.
ASP.NET follows RoR structure, and therefor you don't have the reusable apps. If you check the folder structure in a MVC project, you don't even find the RoR's Plugin folder, so I bet you should do it VisualStudio-Like.
Create a reusable app, as a separated project, include references for that project in your main one, and in your Route file, just redirect to the other project's controllers.
This might be of interest as well: App Areas
we've tried to do something similar, albeit from a different angle. we use compositional controllers for increased reusability in bistro, and an ndjango as the templating language. what we start to see is controllers become more granular, and as a result less dependent on where they reside - more componentizable.
Has anyone successfully used a CMS developed for standard ASP.NET with ASP.NET MVC?
I currently use Immediacy CMS and it seems to be quite tightly coupled with standard ASP.NET, but I'd really like to start using ASP.NET MVC.
Are there any CMS systems out there directed at MVC?
How could I persuade my employer to move to ASP.NET MVC?
I suggest take a look to Kooboo (kooboo.com), a simple to use but powerful for developers. Well documented API and based upon ASP.NET MVC (of course ;-)
N2 CMS has an example site in ASP.NET MVC that I've been playing around with that works quite nicely - note that the code is now hosted on Google Code.
The problem you've got is that many CMS' already do a lot of "routing" in that the pages you are requesting/editing don't actually exist on disk, but are all in a data store of some kind, and there's an HttpHandler or ISAPI Filter sitting in front of ASP.NET to intercept the requests and work out what should be happening.
I have not personally seen any of the big name CMS systems out there upgraded yet to take advantage of many of the new things the .NET framework offers, let alone start working on the MVC framework.
As with all things, a cost-benefit analysis is the best way to convince your boss to do anything. If you can point how how moving towards the MVC framework is going to make some immediate positives (as well as many long term positives) that can outweigh the costs (in time, energy, and money) in the switchover, then you have succeeded.
ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are very different beasts in terms of how you develop applications on top of them. Technically, an ASP.NET MVC application is an ASP.NET application with some generic handler that invokes the core MVC framework.
The ASP.NET MVC framework is also relatively new (1.0 just released last MIX) and so it'll take a while before becoming mainstream.
How you can persuade your boss? Talk to him about the positive sides of ASP.NET MVC, and how it will improve his future business. There's plenty of material available to demonstrate that.
I do a lot of work using Immediacy (I used to work there) and I had thought about doing the same thing a couple of months ago. I think that the main issues would result from things like the plug-in handler, the idoc handler and (if your still using it) the ilink hander.
When you enable things like friendly URLS I think this would cause issues if you had similar named methods in your controller actions.
You may be able use some MVC in your project, I could see it working as an admin add-in but I couldn't see it being used to usefully in the main webroot.
I would think a CMS would have to be built using MVC in mind to get the most benefits from using the pattern, instead of trying to make it work in parallel with a pre-existing system API (limited as it is) and making more work for yourself.